Founded in the late 1970s, J. Obermeier provides a broad range of earthworks, demolition, civil engineering and haulage services throughout the greater Freising and Munich areas from its base of operations in Abersberg.
In the early 1980s, the business acquired a five-hectare gravel pit and commenced quarrying operations to support public and private sector construction in the municipality, including the landmark development of Munich Airport.
“In simple terms, across all the different divisions of our business, we dig, haul and process materials that are critical to the construction industry,” owner Josef Obermeier said.
“However, conserving natural resources is at the forefront of everything we do,” he stressed.
“The days when valuable building materials or excavated soil from demolition and earthworks were more or less carelessly disposed of in a gravel pit are definitely over.”
It’s this commitment to conserving resources and minimising environmental impact, combined with the entrepreneurial spirit to spearhead change, that became the foundation of a forward-thinking partnership between the family enterprise and wet processing experts CDE.
In recent years, the company has been dry recycling construction and demolition (C&D) waste to close the loop and return usable sand and aggregate resources to industry. Josef Obermeier said this is a significant part of the business transitioning for the 21st century.
“We continue to run natural sand and gravel operations because of industry demand, but we are actively investing in our recycling capabilities, now and into the future, to offset the impact of this work and to eventually transition to a business where the majority of what we produce is recycled material.”
“Our dry process has played an important role in recent years, but we see wet processing as the future to ensure we capture as much quality material as possible.”
From the outset of its circular journey, close attention was paid to the company’s existing operations to ensure that the production of primary sand and aggregates was running as efficient as possible.
“This was a very important aspect of the project,” Josef Obermeier said.
“We wanted to build a plant that was fit for the future but could also support our material needs today. We wanted to make the best use of our existing natural resources to expand and improve our product range, while retaining the option of converting the plant to a recycling operation once the permits were in place. That’s where CDE came in.”
“I heard about CDE through a recommendation and ended up visiting several sites where their equipment was in operation. I was impressed by what I saw, and I left convinced that we had found a partner aligned with our values and who could see this ambitious project through.”
The solution engineered by CDE for J. Obermeier is capable of processing up to 150tph of primary sand and gravel. Uniquely, the plant also boasts impressive recycling capabilities.
The plant incorporates CDE’s M2500 modular sand washing plant, which integrates feeding, screening, washing and stockpiling on a single chassis, as well as the AggMax scrubbing and classification system, which combines pre-screening, scrubbing, organics removal, sizing, stockpiling, fines recovery and organics removal on a compact chassis. The system also incorporates CDE’s AquaCycle thickener for primary stage water management, which ensures up to 90% of process water can be recycled and recirculated for reuse in the system and is linked to an existing photovoltaic system to drive down running costs and CO2 emissions.
Since 2009, solar panels on the roof of the company building have been producing emission-free and climate-neutral electricity. In addition, a photovoltaic system on the infilled gravel pit has been gradually expanded since 2019 and is expected to reach an output of three megawatts by 2025.
Operational now for 9 months, the plant has expanded the company’s product suite from a simple range of sand, backfill and anti-freeze gravel to a broad range of premium sand and aggregate products for the concrete industry, including: fine sand, 0/4mm concrete sand, 4/8mm and 8/16mm washed aggregate, 16/32mm aggregate and +32mm oversized.
Josef Obermeier said the plant is an ‘antidote for an industry that consumes significant volumes of raw materials’ and where energy usage is high.
“Our partnership with CDE will really help to ease pressure on these finite resources so that we can better meet the demands of the market today, in the most sustainable way possible, while also building a facility that can pave the way for a circular economy into the future.”
